Course of Study

The curriculum that aims to prepare students to facilitate positive social change.

Format

The TLD program is offered in an online format. Students work in the online environment of the CIIS virtual classroom. Each August and January, students and the faculty gather for an intensive at a retreat setting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Participation in the intensive is mandatory.

Student Spotlight

I work in the outdoor adventure leadership field. I lead and teach people how to safely engage in outdoor adventure activities. I've worked in this field for the last twenty-five years, and learned a lot about leadership and how we humans interact with each other and the natural world. My interests are now focused on the more "intentional" aspects of the field, like ecotherapy and ecoliteracy. This shift in focus has primarily come from the realization of the potentially great influence outdoor adventure leaders have upon the general public they serve. I've come to see our contemporary human problems as stemming from a fundamental misperception and wrong-relationship. The MA in Transformative Leadership is helping me to make this transition in my career's focus by giving me a much broader understanding of human nature and leadership. In fact, this transformative learning experience is fundamentally changing the scope of what I thought I could accomplish as an outdoor adventure leader. The history of the collective way humans have related to the more-than-human world is an extremely complex story, and this course of study is giving me practical skills to meet the challenge of understanding the complexities of being human on this Earth.